


abyssopelagic

by verulams (finnlogan)



Series: rebound ethics [2]
Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Creation, F/M, Gen, Humanity, Mentions of Smith, POV Neo, Robot Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:35:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28735071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnlogan/pseuds/verulams
Summary: Thought is funny, when you can see it written in other people's code but can't figure out how you do it yourself.Neo thinks of deep-sea creatures and tries to figure out exactly how things have gone wrong.[abyssopelagic/ (əˌbɪsəʊpɛˈlædʒɪk) /adjectivereferring to or occurring in the region of deep water above the floor of the ocean]
Series: rebound ethics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2106630
Kudos: 10





	abyssopelagic

They step forward into the cacophony. Rending his brain backwards and forwards, Neo eases himself back into the ordeal.

He and Trinity move through the crowd like it were water. Like they were abyssal sea creatures forced through to the lighter water above. Reading about them in class was always strange. That there were these huge, awful, monstrous things living on the same planet as him… that upset him.

She cocks her head towards him, incremental, tiny in a way he knows he should barely notice. She watches him for a second and then opens her mouth. “What are you thinking about?” She murmurs, and they walk through the scene as if it were real.

“Gulper eels,” he returns. “Abyssal fish. And… anti-freeze proteins.” 

She nods as if all of that made sense. “Right.” A few more steps and Neo can see her thoughts written in her code before she even stops. Before she turns around, there’s a subroutine. It flickers. She whirls on him, snaps to position, cocks her hip and her head. In that order. “Have you… always been like this?” 

She speaks before she thinks, and she recoils and edits down when she realises what she’s done. Immediate. Trinity was a good coder. ‘He can’t have been like this the  _ whole _ time,’ reads her code, and she’s right.

He wants to not see it. He wants to unsee it. He wants to strike it from the record. But he can see it anyway, and because he’s coded, he knows it will never be forgotten or cast aside. Trinity thinks about how he’s strange and detached, and she thinks about how she  _ still loves him _ .

Cringing and twisting, Neo is reminded that he is still a little bit human. Even so, there is nothing left of him not reduced to green and shadowy sinews. That’s what he is. 

He keeps his face tight and nonchalant. Maybe that’s not the right move. He has half a millisecond to process, and then simply makes the decision to lean into the code. That, at least, was predictable. “No,” he says eventually. “I don’t think I’ve always been like this.”

The truth is predictable. 

The Merovingian makes him want to claw his fragile machine-casing-skin off, but he was nevertheless correct. “Cause and effect,” Neo mutters and makes a mockery of him in his head. He could write a Merovingian-style programme to deconstruct. Maybe that would help.

“Hm,” Trinity says, and loves him anyway.

* * *

He wakes up from a sleep that’s not-a-sleep in the stillness. He remembers having no mouth. He remembers Smith’s face. Here in this new world, with Morpheus and Trinity and the echoes of other things, there is no Smith. 

Maybe Smith would  _ get _ it, understand better than he could. Smith was more human than he was, anyway.

...That was probably a bad sign, but he can’t ascertain the truth of it. He casts it aside.

Morpheus and Trinity exist in this programme that he’s built. They are the most important. Or really, they  _ weren’t _ the most important, they were just important to  _ him. _ He acknowledges that and disregards it as well.

He’s basically a god. Cut him some slack. Let him play favourites if he wants to.

He clambers his way out of the bed as if he needs to clamber. As if he couldn’t just… edit the code so that he was standing, one frame to the next. Like a video game. Like a technological advance was to be found in clipping through the fabric of the universe.

He blinks and doesn’t wake Trinity. The room is dark, comforting, and it sits softly between his furrowed brows. He sighs and shuts the door as he pads through to the kitchen. And there’s Morpheus, just where Neo knew he would be, and just like Neo remembers him.

Morpheus looks fragile. Neo does too, he knows, like his floppy hair and his cold hands meant he was in some way human.

Morpheus smells warm and says nothing as Neo sits down opposite him at the kitchen table. 

“Do you remember when you… showed me?” Neo murmurs. He thought he’d been clear, but the code reads confusion.

“When I…?” Morpheus croaks. It’s the first time he’s spoken in a while. It’s still bass-ridden though, still deep.

“Welcome,” Neo echoes, “To the desert of the real.”

Morpheus startles out a barking laugh, slapping his hands on the plastic of their cheap kitchen table. “Oh! When I showed you,  _ yes _ .” 

“You were always dramatic,” he smiles, and it only feels a little alien on his face. That’s a win.

Morpheus smiles too. “So were you, after you realised I was right.”

Neo hums out an agreeable noise, and then sighs. Maybe Morpheus was dramatic because he was bitter. He turns the thought around in his head, a shiny piece of sea glass trapped at the bottom of the sea. He certainly  _ used _ to be bitter. Morpheus was the one in charge of loving the world. Neo only had to save it. “How did you…?”

Neo stops. His mouth had said that without permission, and that rarely happened these days. He clears his throat and says it anyway. “How did you think I was going to… respond? When you told me I was… the one?” He hesitates. He’d almost said ‘god’.

After all, that question was one he’d always wanted to answer. How was he meant to respond? How was he meant to have felt? Dead? Alive? Monstrous? 

The phrase rings back to him. Godly?

It might be helpful to know what Morpheus had thought, anyway, because, after everything, Neo had simply chosen to not feel anything at all.

Morpheus eyes him darkly. “Neo, I don’t think…”

Neo  _ tries _ not to look at the code, but- “You didn’t think about it at all.” He says, apathetic. His tone rings like cardboard. It often does.

“No,” Morpheus lies, “I did. But it was inevitable. It was-”

“ _ Inevitable? _ ” Neo parrots and is god forbid, shocked out of whatever frame of godliness he’d thought he’d been occupying. He searches the code, instantaneous, for any hint and any echo-

“Neo,” Morpheus mumbles, “It’s just a turn of phrase.”

His eyes go blank, unseeing, and he trawls the world for the word, for the imprinted facsimile that might retain an  _ inch _ of his code, for anything-anything-anything that might clarify that he  _ isn’t human and the fuckin’ dead programme clasped in the grip of the machine world  _ **_is_ ** _ - _

Morpheus’ hand lands on his shoulder and Neo hurls himself up. Morpheus is unsteady, parallel sinking lines of his shoulders schooled into shape. Neo’s breathing heavily. He hasn’t done that in a while.

“Sorry,” says Morpheus, like an admission. Like truth.

Silence pulls them both in, and Neo stands and stares out of the window into the dark. Morpheus, gently lowering himself into the chair, looks at him curiously.

“Neo,” he soothes, “How long have you been like this?” 

“Always,” Neo says, sharp. “Or, since right now. Since this second, or this one. It’s… complicated.”

Morpheus hums a noise. “Yes, I imagined it would be.”

“You don’t smell… human, you know,” Trinity calls.

Neo swerves, twitches on his heel and stares at her. She hangs spectral in the doorway, and in her sleepwear, she almost looks… harmless. “No?” he asks as if he can’t already read it in the code.

“No.” Morpheus agrees, and Trinity’s eyes twitch from Neo to Morpheus and back again. 

“You smell like… I don’t know. Acrid. Acidic. You smell like cleaning products, Neo. Or like the nutrients in the food we eat-  _ used to _ eat, before it was turned into food.”

He doesn’t blink as he stares at her. He doesn’t need to.

“Sorry,” he says, eventually.

Trinity sits down at the table. “Don’t be.” She pushes her hair up, away from her face where it had fallen out of place. She stares at him.

Morpheus stares at him too, and he can’t figure out why.

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism is welcome.
> 
> You can find me @[ finnlogan ](//finnlogan.tumblr.com) or @ my fic blog [verulamfic](https://verulamfic.tumblr.com) on Tumblr. I am taking requests on my fic blog!


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